The Death of BRB

There used to be a phrase people typed into chat windows that nobody uses anymore. “BRB” - Be right back. Three letters that meant practically nothing and somehow meant everything.

At the time, nobody thought about it. You typed it because your mom was calling you down for dinner or someone knocked on your door or the physical world was interrupting and it needed your attention. You typed it and you left. And everyone on the other side of the screen just understood. The conversation paused, nobody sent a follow-up message, nobody thought absence meant disinterest. Leaving was just a normal thing that people did because the internet was a place you went to, not a place you lived inside permanently.

That distinction matters more than it sounds.

The shift happened slowly enough that nobody noticed it happening. Platforms went mobile, notifications became persistent, feeds stopped having an end point, and the internet stopped being a destination with an address you typed and a window you opened. It became this ambient layer that wrapped itself around every hour of every day. Presence stopped being occasional and became the default expectation, and somewhere in that transition, “BRB” just stopped making sense. You don’t announce that you’re stepping away from something when the entire architecture of that thing is built on the assumption that you never really leave.

The platforms were redesigned around permanence, with endless scroll and read receipts and typing indicators and activity statuses and notification systems that were engineered specifically to pull your attention back before any silence could settle in and remind you that you had a life happening somewhere else. None of this was accidental. Internal research from major social platforms showed that emotionally charged content, specifically outrage and fear and novelty, consistently outperformed neutral content in engagement, so the algorithms adapted accordingly. Retention became the product, and humans became very good at being retained.

The side effect was darker than anyone wanted to admit. Downtime started disappearing, boredom disappeared, and every empty moment became something to fill reflexively without ever actually deciding to. A glance at a notification turned into twenty minutes of scrolling with no memory of what you actually looked at. People stopped logging on and started carrying the whole thing inside their nervous systems, which is a different thing entirely and a much worse one.

That is when doomscrolling stopped being a behavior and became a condition.

Today the average person touches their phone thousands of times per day, entire evenings disappear into feeds that nobody consciously chose to enter, and people wake up reaching for information before they are fully conscious. The mind almost never gets uninterrupted stillness anymore because there is always another input waiting to fill whatever gap might have formed.

So when I think about the death of “BRB,” what I’m really thinking about is what that phrase was actually protecting. It was protecting the assumption that leaving was normal, that you were allowed to disappear for a while without it meaning something, that the world on the other side of the screen did not have permanent jurisdiction over your attention and that your value was not measured in response time.

We didn’t lose a phrase. We lost the belief the phrase was built on.

-Stanley Vaganov, Brutally Human